The closest I had come was a P712+8N->P1 regulator. The input signal could come in any time, but the drive signals (testing whether an input signal had come in in the preceding interval of 712+8N ticks) had to be synchronized mod 8.

Suddenly, building a candidate P1 replacement for the old period-8N and period-60N universal regulators seemed like an insurmountable opportunity:

This regulator should be driven by at least a period-1177 drive gun. That is to say, test gliders should come in on the white glider's lane (from the NW) no less than 1177 ticks apart. Other than that there's no periodicity requirement for the test input. Advance the white glider two ticks to see the difficult case that's handled by the almost-never-used extra eater catalyst.

The signal input is the yellow glider from the southwest. After it destroys the blocking eater, the next test glider will produce an output signal, and rebuild the eater. I've left open two possible output paths, marked with damaged eaters. Either or both can be used.

The next test signal should be sent about 1177*2 = ~2400 ticks later, for absolute safety. There's an optional eater (yellow, circled) in the center that can absorb most test-glider timings, but a few of them would cause trouble -- and it's not really part of the design to lose test signals like that, anyway.

This is just a early alpha version, of course. There must be ways to rewire this to rebuild the eater in less than 1000 ticks -- maybe quite a bit less. Anyone feel like improving the bounding box or the recovery time?

Didn't want the following idea for a practice project to get lost -- it seems like there must be a surprisingly small universal regulator within reach now, and it seems like this is a good thread for tackling that little challenge.

... It might be a good idea to get a lot more H-to-2Gs into the organized stamp collection first, though. I'm still looking for volunteers to run the classifier script.

dvgrn wrote:

dvgrn wrote:

QED wrote:Wow... that's insanity. I looked at the gun for the 15- glider version and it's crazy. Is there any easier first project?

...Another idea that came up was to look for the smallest possible mechanism to edge-shoot a fishhook eater. Let's say a stream of gliders is going by, and then this mechanism off to one side gets triggered to build an eater right on the glider lane. Then all future gliders in the stream get absorbed by the newly built eater.

Actually this might be a better idea than I thought. The stable universal regulator just came up on the "Things to be discovered" thread, and I went and had a look at it. It needs a drive gun with a period of 1177 ticks or more, and it kinda sorta edge-shoots a glider -- at least, it would if you turned it inside out, routing both of the synchronized rebuild signals clockwise.

Whoever built that universal regulator clearly had absolutely no idea what they were doing.** There's a whole extra completely unnecessary G-to-H-to-G component in each of the two signal branches, that really doesn't do anything but waste time.

It should be possible to replace the H-to-2G in the center of the universal regulator. Pick the correct H-to-2G from the draft glider adjustment toolkit, and use only Snarks for the rest of the reflectors. It should be possible to cut the bounding box considerably, and get the minimum drive gun period well down below 1000, at the very least.

This is another case where the synchronization problem is as simple as it can possibly be -- only two gliders. And it's a useful mechanism, so either

1) people would actually copy and use it for years in other patterns, and the pattern would end up in the LifeWiki with your name on it;

or

2) your improvement would make other people pay attention to the problem, and one or more of them would find even smaller faster solutions, and then the smallest fastest one would end up in the LifeWiki instead.

EDIT: Okay, the following at least gets the recovery time below 1000. The drive gun can be any period 970 or above. The minimum separation between input signals is about twice the drive-gun period -- 1932 ticks for a p970 drive gun, 1934 ticks for a p971 drive gun, etc.

Here's a universal regulator driven at p971 and tested by a p1935 gun. 971 is prime, so the resulting oscillator has a period of 1,878,885 ticks. Every possible combination of inputs is tested, so the regulator must really be universal:

I keep trying different technology, but haven't found a really lucky match yet. Kazyan's new color-changing reflector looks nice, but ends up a bit too slow to improve anything with this particular H-to-2G (discussion moved here from triller's p30 thread):